The present invention is directed to methods and systems for automatically creating a provisioning environment based on the probability of an event necessitating disaster recovery from the provisioned environment.
Disaster preparedness and recovery are a necessary aspect of any mission critical software, hardware, or information technology product or service in order to ensure continuity of service in the event of a catastrophic event. The costs associated with downtime during an event can be significant. Accordingly, it is necessary to have duplication of data and data processing systems, such as a disaster recovery environment, to rely on when the primary data or systems are damaged, destroyed, or otherwise non-functional.
Traditionally, disaster recovery environments are expensive to create and maintain. The entire infrastructure must be duplicated to the disaster recovery environment, and then must be maintained. Indeed, there are numerous aspects of data and data processing systems that may change rapidly and thus must be duplicated on a continuous basis. Accordingly, in addition to continuous duplication, there is ongoing maintenance of servers, application servers, middleware, and other aspects of the two systems. There is also a large strain on the network of the organization when a large duplication project is underway. To control costs it is not uncommon for large organizations to maintain remote data centers where the duplicated data is stored. As would be expected, building and maintaining a remote data center is extremely expensive.
Alternatively, there are services that offer remote hosting of duplicated data and data processing systems. These remote hosting services allow for continuous availability at a reduced cost, which is especially advantageous to smaller organizations without their own remote data center. However, maintaining a disaster recovery environment for even a small organization can be prohibitively expensive over time.
Rather than continually maintain a fully functional provisioned environment, it would be advantageous to detect or predict when disaster recovery from a provisioned environment might be required, and then implement the provisioned environment just prior to the event. There are currently no systems that adequately predict a need for disaster recovery and implement a provisioned environment in response to that prediction.
Accordingly, there is a continued need in the art for methods and systems that can predict the possibility of a disaster and, in response, can implement a temporary provisioned environment that can be utilized in the event of the possible disaster.